Word Press Plugins

By Steve, on March 13th, 2012

There are hundreds, possibly thousands of WordPress plug-ins that you can install to add extra features and tools to your Word Press blog, but which ones should you use… there is so many and a lot of the duplicate the functions of each other.

So here is my current list of plug-ins for this particular blog, I use a similar choice on our other WP sites, which are now about 19 in total if you include client sites which I maintain.

Akismet – Used by millions, Akismet is quite possibly the best way in the world to protect your blog from comment and trackback spam. It keeps your site protected from spam even while you sleep.

All in One SEO Pack – Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation… nothing to do with UK Civil Service Senior Executive Officers! It changes the meta data on each of your posts to include the right keywords for each post, this will improve in theory your ranking on Google.

Google Analyticator – Adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google’s Analytics. After enabling this plugin visit the settings page and enter your Google Analytics’ UID and enable logging. An essential plug in if you want to know how many people are reading your blog and what they are looking at…

NextGEN Gallery – A NextGENeration Photo Gallery for WordPress – A great way to add photo galleries and slide shows to your blog.

nrelate Related Content – Easily display related content on your website. It looks for similar content on your blog that people might also want to read, works better the more posts you have obviously. So not an essential install at first plug-in.

Share Buttons by Lockerz / AddToAny – Help people share, bookmark, and email your posts & pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, StumbleUpon, Digg and many more.

Tweet old post – This plugin helps you to keeps your old posts alive by tweeting about them and driving more traffic to them from twitter. Again this works better once you have a lot more posts available.

User Photo – Allows users to associate photos with their accounts by accessing their “Your Profile” page. Uploaded images are resized to fit the dimensions specified on the options page; a thumbnail image is also generated.

WordPress Backup to Dropbox – Keep your valuable WordPress website, its media and database backed up to Dropbox in minutes with this sleek, easy to use plugin. If you don’t have a Dropbox account yet, you should get one… it’s after all free for a 2GB account, enough for a blog back up.

WPtouch – A plugin which formats your site with a mobile theme for visitors on Apple iPhone / iPod touch, Google Android, Blackberry Storm and Torch, Palm Pre and other touch-based smartphones. Mobile traffic to blog sites is increasing, this plug in allows mobile users to see your site on a small screen yet it still offers them the option to view the full site.

Keep your plug-ins up to date as they are frequently updated and improved.